Revolution
written by: H.E. Ross
Pops could be heard before I could define the city’s shape…cracks and pops, quiet, then more of either. At first, I assumed the noises were a celebration of some type, but easily they grew into being guns firing in the joy and anger of revolution.
Within the haze of the port city spiralled funnels of smoke reaching toward the mountain peaks that joined the clouds. Grey strips in the green of life.
I looked about me to see other boats sailing these seas, crews staring toward the Prince’s Port, staring at the landsman’s doings, calculating how to profit with the loving edge of fun thrusting. We waved to each other, smiling in our different ways. The spiritualism of piracy pounding our hearts to life.
We could not contain ourselves, conch calls and wild screams announced us, the pirate fleet of sensualists come to call on the unguarded. We could not contain ourselves in the light breezes with crews of delirious ragamuffins and dancing machetes. All teeth we were, eyes, and pointed things, in the bright afternoon sun.
We were going to plunder this city, capture its women, and burn it into memory. We were pirates, worshippers of the free winds, destroyers of enslaved lands.
I went below and brought back a rum bottle. I sent a libation to the sea loa, Agwé, and drank, filling my mouth and gulping. The blood of flibustiers surged me to a lion-heart as conch shells moaned all about, machetes poking the sky, rum bottles passing, we move in a forest of canvases over the slight swell and grand widening wakes. Ahead and after me were rakish sailing craft. Beneath me, fine teak runs on a tilting deck that holds billows of proud sail.
I drank more rum and reefed my mainsail to a noticeably stiffening breeze. There became less celebration of banding, more consternation, and sitting. The fleet became fragmented, Magic cut through the leaders, the slowest or un-ablest dropping behind, others taking their best known routes in their point of breeze to their particular destinations. The raiders are now scattered by the forces that pulled them together.
I put the rum bottle below, knowing one pirate who would need his wits about him to enter port and depart with his treasure.
A man with a wide straw hat fishing in the heat of the day off the pier’s end. A tranquil scene accented by his bare feet hanging still, shadowed beneath the wharf. The popping and crackling shots in the city caused him to turn from time to time, nodding as though to remind himself of the revolution over there. I waved to him several times, but he did not respond.
- Revolution - October 2, 2026
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